Passing as a Rabbit
From the Facebook posts that I’ve read and the YouTube videos I’ve watched, I’ve learned that there are no typical experiences of Autism. The experiences of growing up with with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), even when diagnosed at an early age, are too varied to present more than a sliver of one’s experience. I point this out because I don’t know anyone else with ASD.
I just had my 58th birthday last month. I wasn’t diagnosed with ASD until I was 57.
I started watching David Lynch’s Rabbits [on YouTube] for reasons unrelated to my ASD. My immediate reaction about 2 minutes into viewing the first episode was, “Holy crap! It’s like watching The Big Bang Theory!” It took me some time to decipher and articulate that feeling of recognition. As I did, I also realized that watching that first episode of Rabbits also presented something about my socialization and social skill set that I hadn’t noticed before. But first, I need to explain why watching that first episode of Rabbits is like watching The Big Bang Theory, or pretty much any contemporary sitcom, even It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a show as different as might seem possible from The Big Bang Theory.
These comments are applicable to American sitcoms centered around a group of friends and acquaintances. Friends was the model for similar shows that came in its wake. It’s no accident that queries of the type, “Which [insert title of sitcom] character are you?”, autocompletes in the Google search box. There wasn’t just one site, there were many. I found it striking, a little dumbfounding that people, lots of people, would see themselves as a “Sheldon” or a “Ross” or a “Koothrappali” or a “Rachel” or some other character from one of those shows.
At this point, most critics are tempted to go off on a tangent about the narcissism of American television and Culture. Maybe American Culture is pathologically narcissistic, and a comparative analysis of American political advertising, the mechanics of the relative popularity of TV shows, and televised sports would yield valuable insights into mass democracy. Maybe not. Regardless, I am after other quarry.
A propensity and predilection to sometimes find others to be “like” me is foreign to my way of thinking and feeling. Similarly, I don’t think I have ever referred to myself as “the kind of person who …” These habits of thought indicate that such a person sees themself as part of a group, as having a group identity of some sort. In the case of contemporary American sitcoms, a viewer may see herself as like Penny. Others picture themselves as other characters. Secretly (and maybe not so secretly), fans imagine themselves as part of that group of friends and would be in reality if only suitable metaphysical, economic, and social circumstances would oblige.
It is this ability and propensity to identify with groups, whether a group of friends on a sitcom, a sports team, or a particular social identity, that perplexes me to no end. By way of evidence, listen to sports fans talk about their teams, “We had a first down…” or “It was our turn at bat when …” etc.
For most of my life, I attributed my dislike of watching sports and of sports fandom generally to the difficulties that my father and I had throughout my childhood, adolescence, and into my early twenties when we became completely estranged. The possibility that some of my personality quirks are not due to bad parenting and trauma is intriguing to say the least. But that’s neither here nor there for my present purpose.
The experience of watching Rabbits perfectly captures that feeling of standing outside looking in that characterizes my experience of ASD in attempting to socialize like “normals.” In the first episode, characters make their appearance. Actors wear large, mostly identical rabbit heads. Facial expressions are impossible to read, because there are none to be read. There is inscrutable dialogue punctuated by laughter from a laugh track to no discernible punchline. Presumably, the rabbits find it funny. Characters make entrances to applause, again for no discernible reason, but it all seems perfectly normal to the rabbits. To us, the viewers, this is disconcerting, going against expectation for the genre.
There is an inescapable suspicion that this all makes sense, but not for us the viewer. Some something is missing, which would tie everything together into coherency. If we imagine a “normal” non-ASD person thrust into an episode of Rabbits, he (or she) would often say the wrong thing, and sometimes through dumb luck would manage to say something that would not be a non sequitur. Rabbits are just as perplexed by “normals” as “normals” are by rabbits. Or, as in the Doors’ song, people are strange.
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ADDENDUM.
I realized shortly after publishing that “Passing as a Rabbit” was more than a little misleading. It’s not that I always feel awkward around other people. Most of my socializing is in the context of English instruction or connected to teaching. I do best in one-on-one conversations. Having 2 or more conversation partners is confusing. There’s too much for me to keep track of. My classroom persona can be thought of as engaged in a series of short (usually) one-on-one conversations that benefit the rest of the class.
The one time in my life when I did not feel overly awkward & distant from others was the three years that I lived in Poland at the end of the 1980s. It would be more accurate to say that communication difficulties & not being/feeling like what others expected and assumed me to be. Where and when I was in Poland, there were precious few Americans. It was “ok” to be different because nobody knew what Americans were (supposed to be) like.
During my 3 years in Poland, I was partially bilingual in the second year, and fully bilingual by the end of the 3rd year. Speaking Polish allowed me to assume a mask. If the mask slipped, it was “ok” because not speaking Polish perfectly like a native speaker was part of the mask. Further, these slips of the mask, whether missteps of language or of culture, were easily fixed. I could always ask my conversation partner or my girlfriend about it. The way Poles were about an American speaking Polish was nothing short of wondrously encouraging. Everyone was helpful and at a minimum never rude.
